


Home is somewhere I'm going

by sofriel



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Gen, M/M, Memory Loss, Native American Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-30
Updated: 2013-11-30
Packaged: 2018-01-02 22:36:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1062459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sofriel/pseuds/sofriel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are the things Cecil remembers, and the things he doesn't, and the things he tries not to remember but does anyway. (Navajo!Cecil.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home is somewhere I'm going

**Author's Note:**

> "Maybe home is somewhere I'm going and have never been before." -Warsan Shire.
> 
> Essentially the fic version of [this post](http://sofriel.tumblr.com/post/68225399995/i-actually-have-a-lot-of-really-tragic-feels-about).

1.

Cecil’s mother used to braid his hair every morning, her deft hands pulling his hair hard so it would make a smooth plait. She wore her own hair loose and it hung down her back, streaked with gray, frizzy at the ends, like she had given up on it. It was one of the few clear memories from his childhood, the feeling of her hands twisting, smoothing, all while she ran through the neverending list of safety reminders. Cecil would pat her hand reassuringly and she would just shake her head, press her hand against his back once before he ran out the door, staring after him as he dodged the spots on the sidewalk that didn’t actually exist.

His hair was dangerous if left unbound—not like his classmate Sally’s hair, which tended to burst into flame if she waited too long to use the restroom, but because it would constantly tangle on other students’ rifles or get stuck in the purple ooze inside his locker or just look plain ridiculous during the bimonthly gravity reversal test.

Cecil asked his mother once if he could get his hair cut, and immediately retracted his request when she burst into tears. He wrapped his arms around her and apologized and said he liked his hair very much and please don’t cry and finally she shooed him away and went back to cooking dinner, which tasted a little damp and rather salty that night.

Later that evening, Cecil stood outside the door of the kitchen and heard a familiar voice crackle from over the phone, saying, “You will _not_ cut his hair, not so long as I am living, I promise that.”

  

2.

On weekends, his mother would drive them over to his grandparents’ house. They spoke to each other in a language he couldn’t understand, and when he asked his mother she said it was Navajo. He even learned a few words, until he looked it up and found it wasn’t on the list of municipally-approved languages.

His grandfather sat him on his lap one day and began to speak in Navajo. Cecil squirmed, nervous, and his grandfather started again in English. He spoke of dark worlds and of clouds and of the first people, his deep brown eyes serious as he explained how the world had come to be. He spoke of the sacred mountains and the hogan he was born in and the songs he sang at sunrise when Cecil was born. He said, “This is how the People were created. This is where you come from.”

Cecil sat quietly until he finished. He looked at his mother, questioningly, and then at his grandfather, and then at the bushes outside the window. “But Grandpa…mountains aren’t real,” he said softly. “If you say those things out loud City Council might re-educate you.”

His grandfather’s face fell. Cecil looked around the room again. His grandmother’s eyes were full, wet, and she said something accusingly to Cecil’s mother. His mother’s hand tightened on her chair, and there was silence in which the distant sound of spider wolves howling was audible. And then Cecil heard his mother speak once, sharply, in Navajo, the only time he ever heard her use the language. She plucked him from his grandfather’s lap and they walked out the door.

After that Cecil began to go see Old Woman Josie on the weekends instead.  

 

3.

He listened every night to Leonard Burton’s broadcast. He memorized the names of the businesses supported by the Sheriff’s Secret Police, he followed the Night Vale-Desert Bluffs football rivalry with a passion, he sang along with the weather. His mother always locked herself inside her room when he did this, and Cecil thought it probably had to do with the tablets that had mysteriously appeared outside city hall, but he didn’t understand why she was so upset. On the radio, things could go the way they were supposed to, following all the city ordinances, without stories of nonexistent mountains and illegal languages to complicate things.

 

4.

When his grandparents died one Valentine’s Day, they were buried in a typical Night Vale ceremony, with the customary ultraviolet scorpion parade and everything. Cecil, age fourteen, stood above their grave and wept precisely the prescribed amount. He looked up into the night sky and a thought crossed his mind, a memory of a story his grandfather had told him once, but it was fuzzy, like something had rubbed an eraser through his mind.

Immediately after the service he went to Telly the barber and cut off all his hair. His mother did not even react, really. She looked at him blankly, numbly. All she did was hand him a plate of spaghetti with mothballs and go to her bedroom. Her hair, gray and frayed, swung behind her. 

 

5.

It was impossible to pick out the point where Cecil’s memory began to become hazy, edges fading into cavernous emptiness. Cecil didn’t think about it, didn’t notice, because how do you notice what you don’t know is missing?

In fact there was no precipice over which things fell into a dark abyss. If Cecil could remember what he couldn’t remember, he would have seen instead a vast landscape of potholes and bridges, a landscape that he danced through without ever noticing his own graceful movement. And then there were the places that were not holes at all but great fogs, ones that sometimes cleared during the right kind of wind, leaving him dazed with a brief flash of his mother arguing with a City Council member, or a picture of sculpted, reddened buttes framed by wrinkled brown fingers, or a wavering song accompanied by a steady rattle. These glimpses lasted only moments before the fog descended again, but they stayed with Cecil in dreams, where even City Council could not reach, no matter how hard they tried.

Cecil did not know how old he was the first time he was re-educated. But it was best, they say, to start young.

 

6.

Cecil could not remember when his mother had gone, or if she had left or died or been sucked into the spiraling vortex that frequently opened its maw outside her place of work. Cecil could not remember becoming an intern at the radio station. Cecil could not remember his traveling partner in Svitz, or how he’d gotten there, or how he’d left.  

He did remember finding his mother’s picture, tucked into the frame of the mirror, peeking out from the cloth he kept hanging for reasons he didn’t particularly understand. She was younger in that photograph, her hair still all black, and she was smiling. 

Telly the barber called to verify Cecil’s appointment that week. He called again. He called approximately 23 times before Cecil picked up the phone and told him in no uncertain terms that he would never, _ever_ touch Cecil’s hair again, not so long as he lived.

There were images, pieces of them, that buzzed into awareness when he thought hard; Leonard’s face, an army of bespectacled grasshoppers, a boy with gaping eyes across the table. Cecil’s hair hung loose down his back like his mother’s used to. There was a story that sometimes wandered through his mind, a woman and her twin sons, before his mind went chasing after it, covering it up as best it could. 

 

7.

These are the things Cecil could remember:

Cecil could remember being the radio host of Welcome To Night Vale. He could remember the list of interns who had bravely served the station. He could remember the Glow Cloud (well, mostly) and he could remember the first time he saw Carlos. He remembered the night they sat under the lights above the Arby’s and he remembered that kiss in the car and he remembered the feeling of Carlos’s body pressed flush against his like a reminder that he was really _there_.

Sometimes, when Carlos talked about mountains like they were real, or when he complained to Cecil about how his mother criticized his Spanish, or when he held Cecil’s hand and helped him burn the remaining cassette tapes, Cecil remembered other things, too.

 

8.

His grandmother had told him once that you can wrap thoughts and prayers into your hair like flowers, or soft meats. Sometimes he would repeat the things he could remember to himself, absently looking out the window as he brushed his hair. Carlos found him like that once. He sat on the bed beside Cecil, sliding one arm up into Cecil’s hair.

“How can you spend so much time praising my hair when yours is this gorgeous?” he murmured into Cecil’s neck. Cecil blushed.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, stopping to make a small noise as Carlos twisted his fingers into the hair around his scalp. “It’s plain and black and long. Just…just like my mother and my grandmother and my grandfather’s hair. There’s absolutely nothing special about it.”

Carlos’s hand stilled for a second, then stroked the entire length of his hair. “It’s beautiful,” he said, soft in Cecil’s ear, which he kissed lightly. “Like you.”

“Carlos, really—”

“No,” Carlos said firmly. “You get to go on about me all the time. At least let me return the favor.” He smoothed a hand over Cecil’s head. “Have you ever braided it?”

“Not…not in a very long time.” Cecil’s voice was quiet.

 Very hesitantly, Carlos took Cecil’s hair in his hands and asked, “May I?”

Cecil looked at lovely Carlos—Carlos who didn’t understand that angels don’t exist and who harbored illicit writing implements, Carlos who asked Cecil to question the reports from City Council, Carlos who reminded him of a time when other people had told him of a world besides Night Vale, Carlos who held him tightly when the memories were too strong, or were nonexistent—and said, “Yes, please.”

That night, he slept with a braid curled around his shoulder the way his body was curled around Carlos, and in his dreams there were six mountains and the rising sun.  


End file.
